6. Eminent statesmen, themselves slaveholders, have conceded this power.  Washington, in a letter to Robert Morris, dated April 12, 1786, says:  “There is not a man living, who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery; but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by legislative authority.”  In a letter to Lafayette, dated May 10, 1786, he says:  “It (the abolition of slavery) certainly might, and assuredly ought to be effected, and that too by legislative authority.”  In a letter to John Fenton Mercer, dated Sept. 9, 1786, he says:  “It is among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.”  In a letter to Sir John Sinclair, he says:  “There are in Pennsylvania, laws for the gradual abolition of slavery, which neither Maryland nor Virginia have at present, but which nothing is more certain that that they must have, and at a period not remote.”  Speaking of movements in the Virginia Legislature in 1777, for the passage of a law emancipating the slaves, Mr. Jefferson says:  “The principles of the amendment were agreed on, that is to say, the freedom of all born after a certain day; but it was found that the public mind would not bear the proposition, yet the day is not far distant, when it must bear and adopt it.”—­Jefferson’s Memoirs, v. 1, p. 35.  It is well known that Jefferson, Pendleton, Mason, Wythe and Lee, while acting as a committee of the Virginia House of Delegates to revise the State Laws, prepared a plan for the gradual emancipation of the slaves by law.  These men were the great lights of Virginia.  Mason, the author of the Virginia Constitution; Pendleton, the President of the memorable Virginia Convention in 1787, and President of the Virginia Court of Appeals; Wythe was the Blackstone of the Virginia bench, for a quarter of a century Chancellor of the State, the professor of law in the University of William and Mary, and the preceptor of Jefferson, Madison, and Chief Justice Marshall.  He was author of the celebrated remonstrance to the English House of Commons on the subject of the stamp act.  As to Jefferson, his name is his biography.

Every slaveholding member of Congress from the States of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, voted for the celebrated ordinance of 1787, which abolished the slavery then existing in the Northwest Territory.  Patrick Henry, in his well known letter to Robert Pleasants, of Virginia, January 18, 1773, says:  “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.”  William Pinkney, of Maryland, advocated the abolition of slavery by law, in the legislature of that State, in 1789.  Luther Martin urged the same measure both in the Federal Convention, and in his report to the Legislature of Maryland.  In 1796, St. George Tucker, professor of law in the University of William and Mary, and Judge of the General Court, published an elaborate dissertation on slavery, addressed to the General Assembly of the State, and urging upon them the abolition of slavery by law.